I Will No Longer Feel Guilty

I was inspired to write this post after reading these guilt messages

 “I remember how horrified I was at the depth of poverty I witnessed while visiting Zambia a few years ago. The guilt I felt upon returning to my warm home and fully stocked kitchen was debilitating for several days.”

 To this day, several years later, I still struggle with this guilt. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes it is too difficult to bear and other times it doesn’t cross my mind. During Compassion’s Christmas banquet, it was particularly heavy.

I was reminiscing and remembered a conversation I had with one of my Zambian friends as we passed a Subway restaurant. He told me how excited he was for Christmas. It was the one meal when his family ate chicken. My heart sank as I remembered this and looked over the beautiful meal that was in front of me.

A few minutes later, Wess was asked to say grace. What followed in the few words he said touched the depth of my heart:

“We know that what we have before us is so much more than those we work for and serve. We are thankful for this blessing and promise to use the strength gained from this meal to work harder for those living in poverty and witnessing injustice.”

I know that many of you may have struggled with this same issue. Maybe you visited your sponsored child or maybe you did mission work in college. You came home with the same guilt I did.

Take heart — do not let this guilt paralyze you. Instead, use it to propel you into action. What can you do to influence those around you and spread awareness?

And another post i read online was:

I’m reminded of my trip to Brazil after reading this. I was helping my youngest sponsored son assemble 2 puzzles at one of the centers. Both puzzles had one or two missing pieces. While my son didn’t seem to mind that pieces were missing, I found myself getting a little frustrated but I hid the feelings.

I work in an affluent school system as an Occupational Therapy Assistant. At times I may help a child learn how to put a puzzle together. When I let a teacher know that a puzzle has missing pieces I’m told to throw the puzzle out because missing pieces will only frustrate the child.

When life or the world in general throws you a curve ball, you can either try to stop it, which is hard, or you can attempt to catch it and chuck it back in one movement, maintaining its energy and adding some of your own clout to it. People who like to talk about revolutions, terrorism, and giant wars are missing the point, and usually way of target. We don't need to destroy our society. We just need to redirect it, which will be easier said than done but nonetheless we should really give it a try.

For example, one simple alteration we would be well advised to make is how we should handle guilt differently. Guilt, or feelings of inadequacy and being "bad" for not having done something that someone else desires, is one of the predominant emotions expressed in our society and is a required and fundamental emotion for someone to be considered "human" by the all powerful and limiting terms of liberal democracy. There's plenty of guilt for every circumstance.

If you don't donate money to help starving African or Asian children (who will in turn after a good meal of Nestlés powdered, high protein supplements breed more starving African or Asian children, thanks to food from the West) you are guilty. If you don't have pity for the right people, and don't say the obligatory things - "Of course, the Holocaust(tm) was terrible" and "At that time, of course, a black man couldn't get a job in America" - you are considered guilty. Even simple things, like leaving the toilet seat up if you're in a house with a woman, can be grounds for massive guilt.

You did not do what others usually liberal types considered "right," so you're supposed to blame yourself and feel bad about yourself and prostrate yourself before others so they can blame you too. This has the double advantage of both disciplining you, and bringing you closer to your controllers by making you want their pity, which says to you, "You're okay and approved by society again, so you're suffering from guilt can cease."

Guilt can even take forms without anyone clearly in charge. For example if you are let's say, age 17 and home on a Saturday night working, it is suggested that you're a loser by the social attitudes you see on television and in the movies. Guilt is mechanical, and occurs even if you're not "guilty," for example, if one chooses to work on Saturday night instead of following the herd, being out drunk and generally being a sheep in the game of supposed freedom.

Our lives are wracked by guilt, from our first consciousness to death. We feel guilty for being prosperous, if we are, and for being destitute, if we're not prosperous. We feel guilty for having more than any other person in this "equal" society, and we feel guilty if we offend someone by actually having an opinion. If we're not popular with the people who declare it important so that they can be popular, we're supposed to feel guilt.

But guilt as we know is  a scam, have you ever notice that the "popular people, correction kids" at any regular school are the ones who aren't good at really anything else? Similarly, the Jewish people who invented the concept of religious guilt in a "Western" sense were failures at everything they did except trade and with it, swindling. They built no lasting monuments, of note; their religion was borrowed chiefly from other of near eastern peoples. Their culture was the hand-me-downs of trading tribes in the region. But what they did have was guilt, and plenty of it.

I find taking a stand against guilt is like catching that curveball and sending it right back to the source. Instead of wasting my energy either convincing myself or others that I'm not "guilty," I put that energy into something with a positive, tangible end result, whether as simple as helping to build my grandparents a back porch or as complex as helping run a political party or organisation. Our creativity is brighter than this dulled world, and there's no need for me to have the self-pity and guilt that afflicts the rest of this society. Maybe this will work for you too -- you're the only one who can control whether or not you feel guilty, for things you have no reason to be guilty about.